First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  In spite of all these objections, the marriage took place in Edith’s Washington home on December 18, 1915. The third bride of a president in more than a century, she attracted enormous attention. At five feet nine, she wore her fashionable French clothes well and, for a touch of the exotic, she explained to reporters that she could trace her ancestry back through nine generations to Pocahontas and John Rolfe. After months of dreariness, the White House came alive again under her direction as she entertained, sat devotedly at the side of a contented-looking president, and even learned to ride a bicycle.124 Elizabeth Jaffray, who worked more than seventeen years as the mansion’s head housekeeper, judged Edith’s first two years there the best of all.125

  By the time of the 1916 election, Americans had more on their minds than the circumstances of the president’s remarriage and whether or not he now slept in a double bed. The war in Europe threatened to involve the United States, and many voters believed a victory for the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, who was reputedly under the influence of Theodore Roosevelt, would increase the chances of the United States’ entry. On the other hand, Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out Of War,” implied a continuation he never actually promised.

  Advocates of woman’s suffrage changed their tactics by 1916 and superimposed a new element on the election. The young minds that Woodrow had so disparaged at Bryn Mawr had matured, and many of them had joined the professorial ranks themselves. Along with their students, they were encouraged by reports from London where the woman’s suffrage movement had taken a decidedly radical turn. Alice Paul, a Quaker, had concluded after witnessing the tactics of English suffragists that American women would have to increase their visibility if they ever expected to vote. She gathered like-minded thinkers around her and ironically used President Wilson’s own political philosophy to justify an attack on him.

  Woodrow Wilson had achieved his scholarly reputation with a doctoral dissertation, published as Congressional Government, which argued the superiority of a parliamentary system over a presidential one. The former provided for assigning accountability, Woodrow Wilson wrote, because the majority party and its leader could be blamed for inaction or inferior legislation. The American presidential system, with law-making divided between the Congress and the chief executive, made it more difficult to assign blame. Woodrow Wilson had urged that the president act as head of his party, fully responsible for its failures, and now that he was in the driver’s seat himself, he had to juggle his own prescription with the reality. President Wilson’s Democratic party held large majorities in both houses of Congress during his first two years in office, but he refused to use that leverage on the side of those who sought a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

  Alice Paul and her followers had already gained national attention in March 1913, when they had secured from Congress a special resolution directing that Pennsylvania Avenue be kept clear for them during the inaugural parade. According to one major newspaper, “Crowds broke through the barriers and formed a solid mass [so that] many persons [were] injured.”126 In response to multiple eye-witness accounts charging the police assigned to that area with negligence, the Senate called for a complete investigation, including an explanation from the Superintendent of Police as to why his men failed to control the mobs. According to one witness, the police had joined in beating the demonstrators. Such an assault on defenseless women prompted many people, who had never previously considered carefully the justice of the suffrage argument, to rethink their position.

  The attention focused on her in 1913 contributed to Alice Paul’s drive during the mid-term election in 1914, and by 1916 she hoped to bring about President Wilson’s defeat. Under the rubric of the National Woman’s Party, Paul’s followers urged people sympathetic to their cause to use their vote in 1916 for one issue only—suffrage. Nine states had already enfranchised women, and a tenth, Illinois, allowed them to vote in presidential elections. Added together, these states totaled eighty-four electoral votes, a significant chunk out of the total of 531, especially in a close election. Both major parties had written suffrage planks into their 1916 platforms but had left action up to the states even though some southern states showed no evidence of budging, and, in fact, Mississippi did not ratify the 19th amendment until 1984. Only the Socialist Party favored the passage of a federal amendment in 1916, and the Woman’s Party leaders thought the time had come to put pressure on both major parties.

  Women who could vote in November 1916 evidently responded more to the peace promises of the Wilson camp than to Alice Paul’s advice, and the incumbent took all but two of the equal suffrage states. Yet Woodrow Wilson could hardly miss the message—that he had garnered only twenty-three electoral votes more than his Republican opponent who had personally advocated a suffrage amendment. Women’s power, if they chose to use it, was no longer insignificant. To underline their point, suffragists stepped up their campaign in January 1917, when they placed twenty-four pickets outside the White House fence. The president, raised to believe that chivalry always wins, sent his secretary to invite the picketers in for tea, and he was visibly upset when they refused.127

  After the United States entered the war in April 1917, the woman suffrage movement divided even its most ardent supporters from one another. In a country at war, some women argued, wisdom dictated putting aside the suffrage fight to concentrate on military victory. Anna Howard Shaw, former president of the Woman Suffrage Association, shelved her pro-vote lectures to devote full time to the war effort, and she could not understand why other suffragists continued with their picketing activities, defending them as an exercise in free speech. The demonstrators exhibited little subtlety in attacking the president, and one of their gold and white lettered signs read: “An Autocrat at home is a Poor Champion of Democracy Abroad.”128

  Edith Wilson showed no sympathy at all for the demonstrators. After her husband had the picketers arrested and imprisoned, she referred to them disparagingly as “those devils in the workhouse,” and she opposed his decision to pardon them a few weeks later.129 Edith’s position in this phase of the Wilson administration makes an interesting footnote to her much publicized role after Woodrow became incapacitated. In neither case did she express the slightest interest in providing for or setting an example for strong and independent women. In both instances, her concern centered on how the issue affected her husband’s well-being—not the issue itself.

  By January 1918, the woman’s suffrage cause seemed poised for victory. New York State had finally passed its own amendment, and the United States’ war ally, Great Britain, prepared to extend the vote to its women. If enough states followed suit, any serious candidate for election in November 1918 would be advised to board the bandwagon. After the House committee gave its nod of approval, a group of Democrats met with the president on January 9, 1918, and announced, as they left the White House, that he now favored a federal amendment on suffrage. The president’s shift was termed “a surprise” by the New York Times, “despite some indications of change.”130 He had been persuaded, he explained, by the need to reward women for their work in the war effort. He could hardly have done less. Two of his Cabinet members, Treasury Secretary McAdoo and Navy Secretary Daniels, had already announced their support for a federal amendment. With many Republicans already on record in favor, passage seemed likely.131

  It is true that many women, including those in the president’s family, had participated on various levels in the war effort. His daughter Margaret announced that she would donate all the proceeds from her singing to the Red Cross, and Eleanor, now married to the secretary of the Treasury, went six mornings a week to supervise a Red Cross storeroom. She left at noon only because she was scheduled to preside at meetings of the Women’s Liberty Loan Committee.

  Edith Wilson outdid them all by converting the White House into a model of wartime sacrifice. She announced that she would observe meatless days just like everybody else, and to save the co
st of cutting the lawn, she borrowed a flock of Shropshire sheep from a Virginia farm. When time came to shear them, she donated the wool, totaling ninety-eight pounds, to the forty-eight states for auctioning, the proceeds designated for the war effort. In Kansas one zealous bidder bought two pounds of White House wool for $5,000 each, and the total sold in all the states brought more than $50,000.132 With less publicity, the First Lady knitted sweaters for soldiers and arranged for a White House car to take furloughed men around Washington. When time came to christen warships, the only First Lady to claim Indian ancestry selected Indian names.133

  At the war’s end in November 1918, President Wilson announced that he would go to Europe to work personally on the details of the peace agreement. The first American president to engage in such an international overture, Woodrow gained enormous attention, and Edith, who accompanied him, also received considerable notice. Florence Harriman, another American present in Versailles, reported that Edith “then, as always, was a First Lady to be proud of.”134 When the Wilsons traveled to Italy after the peace conference, an American army captain compared Edith to the Italian queen and concluded, “I don’t think the Italians have got anything on us.”135

  It remained for Edith’s return to the United States, however, for her to achieve lasting prominence in the history of presidents’ wives. Woodrow had decided to appeal directly to the people for support of his peace plan—a measure necessitated, in part, by the opposition to it in the Senate. On September 26, 1919, while traveling through Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a paralytic stroke and then returned to Washington. For several weeks his condition remained uncertain, and his doctor refused to say specifically what ailed him or even how severely disabled he was. Rumors spread.

  Woodrow’s trusted friend and physician, Cary Grayson, had impressed Edith with the importance of keeping all business from the patient but she hardly needed convincing of the seriousness of his affliction. His trembling hands, gray color, and halting speech told her that, and she resolved to spare him all unnecessary stress. If anyone mentioned that Woodrow ought to relinquish his office to his vice president, the suggestion was quickly discarded, on the grounds that fighting to get back in shape would prove the best medicine. Edith isolated Woodrow from everyone except his doctors, so that even his secretary did not see him for weeks. Any communication that reached the president went first to the president’s wife. “So began my stewardship,” Edith later wrote. “I studied every paper [but] I myself never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.”136

  Observers had no way of knowing who made decisions in the White House, and when she issued memos, signed Edith Galt Wilson, curiosity grew. On papers requiring the president’s signature, Woodrow’s name bore so little resemblance to what it had looked like before his illness that charges of forgery were raised. Edith explained the discrepancy by saying that the bedridden president lacked a hard surface for writing but that his handwriting improved as soon as she provided him with a board.

  Word spread that Edith Wilson was running the government. Housekeeper Jaffray referred to Edith as the “Assistant President,”137 and at a Foreign Relations Committee meeting, one senator stormed that the country was under a “petticoat government.”138 Requests to the president frequently began “Dear Mrs. Wilson,” indicating that the writers recognized her as controlling access to the president if not actually making all decisions. Popular magazines reinforced this impression by reporting that Edith “came close to carrying the burden of the First Man.”139

  Rumors multiplied until finally New Mexico’s Republican Senator Albert Fall and a more sympathetic Nebraska Democrat, Gilbert Hitchcock, were delegated to call on the president, ostensibly to inquire about the handling of a foreign policy matter but actually to ascertain the president’s physical condition and ability to preside. Woodrow appeared surprisingly alert, propped up in bed so that his right arm could shake their hands and retrieve relevant papers which were conveniently placed nearby. Edith sat holding a pen, poised to take notes but pointedly unprepared to shake hands with the men whom she detested as traitors because they had come to check up on her husband. The senators were surprised by the president’s quick retort to Albert Fall, who had insisted, “We are praying for you,” and the president had answered, “Which way?”140

  The cabinet looked for precedents about what to do when a president became seriously incapacitated but refused to relinquish the office. In the one case that seemed relevant, James Garfield had lingered for almost three months in 1881 but the vice president had not taken over. The Constitution left unclear who should decide that a president was no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of the office. In the vacuum that developed, the president’s wife was permitted to enter center stage. She did not have to risk the charge that an ambitious politician might have feared of using the president’s illness to advance her own career.

  Edith Wilson’s relationship with her husband during the winter of 1919–1920 falls into a familiar pattern of activity for First Ladies. Married to men in demanding, stressful jobs, the women attempted to protect their husbands. That marital concern, however, should not be confused with any great personal interest in politics or in government. The theme of First Lady as protector of her husband’s well-being runs through the memoirs of several twentieth-century First Ladies, with Lady Bird Johnson putting it eloquently when she explained to an interviewer: “[Every First Lady] feels first primarily the obligation of trying to make a comfortable area, an island of peace, if you will, a setting in which her husband can do his best work.”141

  Nancy Reagan’s role during her husband’s campaigns and presidency was described in similar terms: she saw her jobs as protecting him from overwork, inadequate staff, and poor scheduling. If Ronald Reagan had been a used car salesman, one wag had it, Nancy would have been dusting the interiors. This particular view of the role of a president’s wife had very little to do with kind of work he did, and it should not be confused with the blatantly political roles that other women (Helen Taft, Sarah Polk, Abigail Adams, and Rosalynn Carter) took in their husbands’ administrations.

  Evidence mounts on several sides that Edith Wilson’s influence in her husband’s administration has been greatly overrated. Edith had never shown any interest in politics, although in the romantic early days of their marriage, she had sat alongside him while he studied official communications. After his death, she refused political involvement, and when Eleanor Roosevelt appealed to her for a statement in support of a woman candidate, Edith cited her forty-year record of obliviousness to politics.142

  Most telling of all, in assessing Edith Wilson’s influence, is the nature of the criticism leveled at her. Her alleged dominance occurred only during Woodrow’s illness, from September 1919 until early 1920. A time of great tumult in the United States, this period included a miners’ strike and a government injunction against mine leaders, a steel strike, the continuation of the fight over the peace treaty, and the deportation of aliens. Yet through all these difficulties, the complaint leveled at the White House was a lack of direction, an unwillingness to act—hardly evidence of a powerful leader. When the attorney general, Mitchell Palmer, began his wholesale attack on people he suspected of being disloyal, the president’s secretary futilely begged Edith to see that her husband acted.143

  Edith had married a man who rarely listened to women on any substantive issue, and only his debilitating stroke placed him in a dependent position so that rumors could thrive about his wife running the country. Her memoirs describe how during his illness she abandoned ideas that differed with his rather than risk upsetting him. When the fight over the League of Nations became particularly acrimonious, for example, she reported that she had suggested to Woodrow that he compromise rather than hold out for what might be a losing proposition. She quickly reversed herself, however, when he accused her of deserting him.144 At least one student of the Wilson administration concluded that Ellen Wilson, had she live
d, might have exerted strong influence on a sick president and possibly convinced him to accept Senator Lodge’s amendments concerning the League of Nations.145 Such a judgment reinforces the interpretation of Edith Wilson as nonpolitical, interested only in Woodrow’s health and happiness. It is ironic that Edith should have gone down in history as the “Mrs. Wilson [who] virtually took over the reins of the White House,”146 while Ellen Axson Wilson has been almost forgotten except by researchers who resurrect evidence of her strength and talent.

  Edith Bolling Galt Wilson survived her husband by thirty-eight years, and when she died in 1961, she was buried beside the president, a tradition begun by Martha Washington. Every widow who had remarried and become First Lady had chosen burial beside her second husband rather than by her first. Edith had lived only eight of her nearly eighty years as Woodrow’s wife, but those few years brought enormous publicity. Two full-length biographies147 detailed the influence she supposedly exerted in the White House and virtually all accounts of her husband’s life assessed her role. She had been called “Gatekeeper Extraordinary”148 and “surrogate President.”149 Yet the consensus is that she described her role as accurately as anyone when she wrote that she simply looked out for her husband’s health.

  Her role during Woodrow’s illness demonstrated another potential trouble sport in the presidential system, whose weaknesses Woodrow had studiously pointed out. In a parliamentary government, which he had favored, the prime minister functioned as head of his party, more dependent on other party members than was a president who won power in a popular election. The prime minister’s term of office is more flexible, and elections take place in response to current needs and problems, while the president’s term is a fixed four years. Woodrow Wilson’s second term had almost eighteen months to run when he became ill, and members of his family thus had the opportunity to make decisions that in other government systems would have been handled by fellow party members. Not until the passage of the twenty-fifth amendment in 1967 was that power vacuum officially filled. Under that amendment, Congress could designate some “body [other than the Vice President and the Cabinet]” whose judgment of a president’s incapacity could be used to relieve him of his official duties. Although not explicitly mentioned in the amendment, the president’s spouse was understood by some people to be able to participate in that decision.